On Thursday morning, Hezbollah said: 200 rockets fired at Israel It was one in all the terrorist group's worst attacks thus far, following the assassination of one in all the group's top commanders by Israel, further fuelling fears of a possible all-out war between the 2 heavily armed opponents.
The Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, which is designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Britain, said it fired on 10 Israeli military sites using a “squadron of drones.” The Israeli military said “numerous missiles and suspicious aerial targets” entered its territory, a lot of which were intercepted, and there have been no casualties.
Hezbollah has Thousands of rockets in Israel within the nearly nine months since Israel began its war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza on October 7. Rockets fired from Lebanon have killed 18 Israeli soldiers and 10 civilians, Israel says, while Israeli shelling has killed about 300 Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and about 80 civilians, in response to a Reuters count.
The relatively low variety of Israeli casualties is because of the Iron Dome, a mobile all-weather defense system designed to guard Israeli territory by firing guided missiles to intercept rockets and other short-range airborne threats. According to the Israel Defense Forces, the success rate is around 90 percent.
The system, which became fully operational in March 2011 and has been upgraded several times since then, has “successfully prevented countless rockets from hitting Israeli communities,” says the Israeli Defense Ministry. Originally produced in Israel, the Iron Dome was developed by the state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems with support from the United States – and Washington continues to supply funds for that today.
The Iron Dome also intercepts around 90 percent of the virtually each day rocket attacks by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, the Israeli army claims. According to Palestinian health authorities, greater than 37,000 people have been killed within the Gaza Strip by Israel's war. The trigger was a bloody offensive triggered by the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7. The attack killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took one other 253 hostages, 116 of whom have since been freed.
But with Israel facing the prospect of a two-front war – with Hamas to the south and Hezbollah to the north – and with Hezbollah possessing an infinite missile arsenal and an estimated 10 times the military strength of Hamas, the query is: Can the Iron Dome be overrun?
“Explosives that Hamas could not even dream of”
An open war between Israel and Hezbollah can be devastating for each side. Already now, at the least 150,000 inhabitants in southern Lebanon and northern Israel have been evacuated from their homes on account of regular cross-border firestorms and are internally displaced.
Retired Israel Defense Forces Colonel Miri Eisin, who heads Israel's International Counterterrorism Institute, said that the Iron Dome wouldn’t be overrun within the sense that it could fail completely; moderately, its interception rate would likely drop within the wake of large-scale rocket attacks, causing greater damage to Israeli infrastructure and more casualties.
“Our interception capabilities are very high. But their percentage will decrease, and that means they can strike in the heart of Israel and cause damage,” Eisin said, adding that it could also affect vital infrastructure reminiscent of power plants and Tel Aviv International Airport.
Hezbollah “has weapons that Hamas cannot even dream of,” she said. “I would say expect hundreds of deaths, thousands of casualties and a very difficult time at the local level.”
The Lebanese Shiite organization, which was founded in 1982 throughout the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon with financial support from Iran, is today considered one of the heavily armed non-state groups on this planet.
“Most estimates suggest that Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets and missiles,” Victor Tricaud, senior analyst on the consulting firm Control Risks, told CNBC. Hamas' rockets and missiles, alternatively, are estimated to be within the tens of hundreds.
Even more vital, says Tricaud, is that Hezbollah has much more modern weapons systems than Hamas, including Fateh guided missiles supplied by Iran and drones.
“Such munitions would have a much greater chance of evading Israel's air defense systems … and would likely cause significant damage to critical economic infrastructure throughout Israel,” he said.
A full-scale war would even be extremely devastating for Lebanon, which is within the midst of an economic and political crisis and whose infrastructure is totally unprepared for a brand new war. A big-scale Israeli incursion and the damage it could cause, particularly in Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Lebanon, could jeopardize the group's standing and support there.
“A hell of a lot more damage”
In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war, which Hezbollah viewed as a victory while Israel viewed it as a strategic failure.
A report by Israel’s Reichman University entitled “Fire and Blood: The Terrifying Reality Israel Faces within the War with Hezbollah” outlined a scenario in which Hezbollah would fire 2,500 to 3,000 rockets and missiles at Israeli military and civilian sites every day for several weeks. By comparison, over the course of the entire 2006 war, Hezbollah fired an estimated 4,000 rockets at Israel.
According to Phillip Smyth, an expert on Iranian proxies and former senior fellow at the Washington Institute, Hezbollah's rate of fire and number of rockets fired already “far exceed” the levels of the 2006 war.
Hezbollah has “demonstrated a domestic production capability for short-range, less accurate missiles that might overrun the Iron Dome militia,” he said. These, along with the group's newer, more accurate missiles and growing supply of suicide drones, “could develop into a way more dangerous problem for the Israelis than in 2006,” he said.
“Increasing the accuracy of those weapons systems is a giant problem,” warned Smyth. “I consider Iron Dome can handle numerous medium-range missiles. They're probably less quite a few, but combined with the accuracy that some UAV attacks have shown, it could do a hell of rather a lot more damage.”
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